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  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Fwd: [permaculture] the hydrogen economy
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 09:02:23 EDT


--- Begin Message ---
  • From: Marimike6@cs.com
  • To: john@eco-living.net
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] the hydrogen economy
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 21:59:15 EDT
In a message dated 6/16/2003 12:50:59 PM Eastern Standard Time, john@eco-living.net writes:
Aloha,

>...A good 21st century pathway to provide
>electricity would be to put windmill arrays up in northern Canada where
>there is constant wind but no population

No human population, you mean?

>to complain about visual pollution (these> arrays are
>very large, both in size and in quantity, and noisy as hell).

Too bad for the critters, eh...

>Put the wind
>to work cracking water, then pipeline the hydro down to population centers
>where it can be sold and used.

How (aside from mere techincal details) is this differnt from drilling for
oil in the ANWR or elsewhere up there and piping it down etc. etc.?

I don't see any paradigm shift. Feed the energy binge by any means
necessary. Same pattern, just different stuff in the pipe.



John Schinnerer, MA


John--

You're raising all the right objections, all right, but I think it's unrealistic to expect the human race to hook a u-turn and go off and die. We're going to get eleven billion people for sure, it would appear, and they're all going to want their own vehicles. Education may change their tastes from SUV's to Subarus, but we're still going to have to find the least obtrusive way to fuel those buggies that is humanly possible to accomplish.

The thing about the Northwest Territories is that in terms of dense populations of any species, there's not much up there. Lots of foxes and marmots and stuff if you look for them, but set within an expanse of limitless-seeming open space. Sure, there will be some impact. It'll just be less than if heavy industry were set someplace else.

You ought to take a look at West Virginia. It'll break your heart. Coal does very bad things when it's recklessly torn from the earth. And the people who live there, suffering the consequences of generations of bad policy, still vote for jobs every time they get the chance. If they didn't, West Virginia would be pristine and poor. In fact, that half of the state that doesn't have any coal seams is pristine and poor. It's a lovely place, where hardly anyone who needs to make a living wants to live.

In short, accepting that there will continue to be people and that there will continue to be energy extraction, it makes sense to me that we're now looking over the least damaging options for indulging their tastes for fast cars and jet skis. Even with a lot of education, I suspect there'll always be more NASCAR fans in the world than there are permaculturists, so it's up to people like us to design the things that people like them don't think about very much.

At least that's my take on the situation. So I agree with you. It's no different from drilling in ANWR except, hopefully, in the severity of its impact.

Mike Elvin


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